As the Pestilence-Elect uses the economy as a sex toy, I expect FZ might perform the entire album “We’re Only In It For the Money.”
Category: Deep political thought
Snow cat
It probably doesn’t qualify as the first snow of the year, but we finally got a dusting at El Rancho Pendejo.
The temp remains below freezing as of 9 a.m., and I’m having a very hard time getting excited about going grocery shopping. But we’re inching our way downward through the pantry toward the basics — beans, rice, chile, etc. — and something, as they say, must be done.
I could slap together a pretty interesting vegetarian combo platter with what I have on hand — bean burritos smothered in green and sprinkled with cheddar, sides of Mexican rice and posole — but that would just kick the ol’ can down the road.
Speaking of roads and cans that need kicking along same, some of us have been having an invigorating discussion in comments about the big bad feddle gummint and what to do about it. I don’t want the blog to devolve entirely into a civics course, but just for shits and giggles, let’s take it on faith that the government is too big and intrusive and our tax burden too onerous.
So how do we shrink the federal government to a manageable size? What would you cut? Whose ox gets gored?
And keep in mind that we are not just cutting functions here. We’re shitcanning people. Our fellow Americans. They enjoy their combo platters, too, as do the folks that sell and serve them, so spare them a thought in your calculations.
As of 2014 the U.S. government employed some 2.7 million people. Walmart only has 1.5 million or so on payroll in the United States; Amazon’s headcount is about 240,000 folks, or about twice as many as Apple.
So I don’t see all these sidelined federales landing cushy gigs moving boxes around an Amazon warehouse, greeting the penny-pinchers at Sam’s Club, or failing to fix my 2009 iMac at the Albuquerque Apple Store.
Cybrrrrrrrrrr Monday
Still no snow here in the Duke City as the Thanksgiving weekend lurches to an overstuffed close. But it’s cold out there — 29 degrees as of java time — and there’s white stuff in the forecast, if not yet on the ground.
Elsewhere, things are heating up a tad. Having sold the rubes a bill of goods, the national media are now gleefully pointing out the dings, dents, leaks and creaks in the gold-plated machinery that is the Pestilence-Elect.
Seems he’s a liar, and a walking, tweeting conflict of interest with his short-fingered paws in some very questionable pockets. His chief adviser is a white-nationalist propagandist and political opportunist. And he’s larding up his administration with the sort of rich, connected honkies you’d expect from pretty much any ol’ rich, connected honky the GOP managed to shoehorn into the White House.
Huh. Who knew? Only anyone who’d been paying attention, is all.
Turns out that if you want to drain a swamp, it’s probably a bad idea to hire the guy who likes the swamp, knows everyone who lives there, and owns a fair chunk of it.
As another famous swamp-dweller once noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Who’s your daddy?
My parents never divorced, though I sometimes wished they would.
We were not a close-knit clan, especially after I hit my teenage years. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to like each other much by then, and being an ungrateful little shit I found them an impediment to self-exploration, so I spent a lot of time away from home, either living in my head or completely out of it.
Some of my friends’ parents had split up, and their lives seemed very different from mine. Sometimes it was the dad who had left, and sometimes the mom, but no matter which player had left the game there was always a hole in the disciplinary line you could drive a Mack truck through. A one-parent household infested by teenagers can give you a few hints about how anarchy might play out in the real world.
And if mom or dad remarried? Sometimes that could get even wilder, because when conventional weapons failed the kid could always drop The Big One: “You’re not my [insert absent birth parent here]!” That would always throw a 20-megaton monkey wrench into the social order and open up a little maneuvering room, though it also left Ground Zero slightly radioactive for a good long while, if not forever.
Fast-forward a few years and it was my friends who were getting divorced, sometimes more than once. Heartbreak, vitriol and vengeance; wash, rinse and repeat. Families shattered and scattered to the four winds as I observed from a different perspective, but still a safe if not exactly comfortable distance.
Now here we are on the brink of a national breakup, and I think I’m finally starting to get a personal feel for the experience.
Dad seemed OK, an eat-your-spinach type and a bit of a geek, to be sure, plus a little too shameless about thumbing through your journal to see what you were really up to while you were pretending to be a good citizen. Still, he was smart, and he tried to be cool, and sometimes he even succeeded.
But one day he’s gone and this other dude is sitting in his chair.
You have brothers and sisters, and some are saying how they’re glad Old Dad is gone and how New Dad is a real wild man, works in TV or real estate or something, and anyway he has a lot of money and we’re all gonna get some. And some others are saying, no, fuck this guy, he talks a line of shit but that’s all it is, and have you noticed he never really seems to go to an office or anything? Plus his kids are all dicks and his friends are all creeps, and we don’t like the way he looks at our littlest sister.
For sure he thinks he’s tough, tough enough to shove your brothers around, anyway, especially the adopted one. And you know one day soon he’s gonna have a go at you, too, and he looks soft, but he’s still pretty big and it’s been a long time since you got into a fight.
And as you look around the table, waiting for the deal to finally go down, that’s when you realize that some of your brothers and sisters are OK, some are assholes, and the rest don’t give a shit who Dad is or what he does as long as they don’t miss the next episode of “Game of Thrones.”
What is to be done?
Yes, the headline is the title of a book by Lenin. …
“I am the Walrus.”
You know what I’m trying to say. …
“I am the Walrus.”
I’m not advocating a communist uprising here, but. …
“I am the Walrus.”
Shut the fuck up, Donny! V.I. Lenin! Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov!
(deep breath)
Anyway: Lenin, Donny and the Walrus aside, the question remains: What is to be done?
As my ideas are probably no better than yours or anybody else’s, including Donny’s and Lenin’s, I’m going to throw the blog open to a discussion about how we, the perplexed citizens of the freshly declared People’s Republic of Kakistostan, should move forward given the “objective conditions,” as my old commie pals used to say.
Some of us have taken to the streets, others to their heels (O, Canada!) and still others to drink, I expect. Also, and too, despair.
So, what next? What now? What is to be done?
Leave your thoughts in comments.
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